So, here we are again, with Yet Another “Back Again” Post – a kind of post that seems to be taking up a little too much space on this site. Anyhow, my dad bought himself a new box to function as server, which is great, because the old one was getting a bit slow. I hope I succeeded in migrating/restoring everything properly, if not, please let me know.
For my birthday, my dad got me a USB MIDI keyboard, which is awesome — especially if I want to use it with GarageBand, because MIDI on the Mac is soooo easy. One thing, though, is that I’d actually rather use it with LMMS and MuSe on my Ubuntu installation, but that seems to be rather difficult. It actually works fine with LMMS, but alas, LMMS does not seem to support SoundFonts and neither can I make (and play) an entire drum kit at once. I have to record each different sound individually — i.e. I have to record the tracks separatly, which is a pain, in my opinion.
So, MuSe and MIDI… It may just be me, but it seems I’ve tried every possible combination of settings and soft-synths, but still no cigar. I know that the keyboard is recognized, because — as I said — I can use it with LMMS, but MuSe just seems to make using MIDI really, really complicated, which is too bad. If anyone knows of any up-to-date documentation on the subject, please let me know, because what I’ve been digging up on google is ancient.
Anyways, I hope I don’t get too carried away with MIDI and totally lose the ability to keep it simple — don’t hesitate to let me know, if that happens. For now you’ll have to settle with my old tracks, until I’ve figured out how to work MIDI on Linux — or at least until I figure out how to make GarageBand obey my every command (hehe, yeah right… Like Apple would let me do that.) Alternatively, if Ardour make that native OS X port available soon and it has (some) MIDI editing capabilities, I might actually use that, because it absolutely rocks my boat.
Finally, if you have any tips or tricks (anything!) regarding MIDI on either Linux or OS X, please comment away (or email me). It’ll be greatly appreciated!
I finally got the stuff moved to another and better web server (very kindly provided by my dad) so hopefully response times will be quite a bit lower than before. I must say, WordPress requiring more than what the old server was capable of delivering was somewhat of a disappointment, but hell, one’s got to get with the times. Standardization over bastardization, glossy gradients over semi-transparency and squircle is the new rounded rectangle!
All this server-raum means a couple of things besides response times. First of all, there may be problems that I haven’t discovered, so let me know if you encounter some. Second, in my experience webmail, ViewVC and stuff has gotten a lot more responsive to the point of actually being usable, so to those affected by that, do enjoy!
Søren Dilling from Politiken has been digging a little deeper [da] and seems to confirm some of my suspicions.
The Medison Celebrity appears to be too good to be true. It’s cheap, comes with Linux preinstalled (Fedora, according to the FAQ) and ships in only 4–6 weeks! We all know, that on the internet, when things seem too good to be true, they usually are.
If we look a little into this, the domain seems to be registered via Surftown A/S and if we look up the server hosting the site, we get:
madsen ~ $ host medisoncelebrity.com
medisoncelebrity.com has address 212.97.132.106
medisoncelebrity.com mail is handled by 10 mail4.surftown.nu.
madsen ~ $ host 212.97.132.106
106.132.97.212.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ws6.surf-town.net.
The same is the case for medison.se, which is the Medison company web site.
All this seems kinda weird, since Medison states in their FAQ:
Q: Why is the laptop much cheaper than other laptops?
A: We see this from a democratic point of view where we believe everyone should be able to afford to have a laptop. The other reason is that we have our own plants where we assemble our laptops.[Emphasis mine.]
They have their own plants for assembling the laptops, but they don’t have a web/mail server and need hosting from Surftown? Maybe one could argue that it’s all to keep the laptop cheap, but I still think it’s fishy. Besides, their first reason for the low price is ridiculous — not a single company has ever survived on a business model based on charity.
Apart from that, their web sites (medison.se and medisoncelebrity.com) look really, really unprofessional and are really sparse on specific information except that they claim to have been doing some designs of different sorts, but apparently they weren’t able to transfer even the smallest amount of those skills to their web sites. Also, it seems strange that their contact address is in Kent, UK while the company claims to be Swedish, but there may be perfectly good reasons for that, I guess.
Furthermore, it appears that a second Medison exists — also a technology firm, this one is Korean though, but active all over the world. I find it hard to believe that both have existed alongside each other since 1996 (when the Swedish Medison claims to have been founded) without any legal clashes about the name and one of them being forced to take another name.
On top of it all, it seems really, really odd, that this completely obscure Swedish company all of a sudden offers some of the cheapest laptops in the world.
However, should this turn out to be true, then it’s absolutely great and I’d definitely recommend it to a lot of people. Let me know if you have any experience (good or bad) with them.